The sudden nature of its passing unspooled us. Last Thursday, a message from the landlords was posted unexpectedly on the pub’s website: “The time has come,” it said, “for us to end the three-decade-long experiment in original thinking, good beer, great music and sarcastic service that was the Tudor House hotel.”
It is hard, without sounding mawkish, to articulate the sadness attached to the closure of this small watering hole in Wigan town centre. After all, the Tudor was just a pub; a red-brick building between the bus station and the technical college. It smelled of flat beer and another night’s revelry, it offered no gastropub menu, and for many years it had terrible plumbing in the toilets.
And yet for me and generations of drinkers in our small town it was a special place; a pub that offered a safe haven from the terrifying, half-dressed chaos swirling around the trendy part of town. You could drink pints, and wear what you liked, and put the Pixies on the jukebox. “The point of the Tudor,” the landlords Russ and Frances Miller wrote in their farewell message, “was that it was an alternative place for alternative people to go and be themselves.”
The drinking establishment of your teenage years occupies for ever a particular place in your heart, and the Tudor was particularly good at nurturing loyalty. It wasn’t about the beer (although it had a decent list of ales) and it certainly wasn’t about the food (if we ever ate there, I think it extended no further than a shared bowl of well-vinegared chips), it was about its profound sense of kinship.
I started going there when I was barely into my teenage years, and I can map the years through the booze we drank – the first thing I ever ordered was a pint of bitter (Hook Norton, I think – I was convinced that the bar staff would never ID someone ordering such a grownup drink). Then my best friend and I took to drinking bottles of Guinness (the labels slid off in one piece, and we reasoned that if any young men should ask for our telephone numbers, it would seem dazzlingly sophisticated to write it on a Guinness label). Later came the giddy year of alcopops, the Christmas holiday reunions soaked in white wine, gin and tonic, brandy.
The pub of your youth is where you practice being an adult and form your own family. To this day, some of my closest friends are still those I drank with at the Tudor. We live all over the world now, our lives have flung us in different directions, but this place still somehow ties us together.
There must be pubs like this all over the country, in our small towns and our suburbs, where the teenagers still drink snakebite and black and harbour lusty crushes, where the jukebox pays no heed to the charts, and the Friday-night lock-ins linger long into Saturday morning. They are rare things, still points in your life, places to which, even years later, you can still return, and know that you will always belong.
